Building microservices the easy way with Dapr

The need that sparked Dapr The journey to open source Observability built-in Latest capabilities and roadmap A perfect companion to KEDA Posted on December 9, 2025 by Dotan Horovits CNCF projects highlighted in this post Ambassador post originally published on Medium by Dotan Horovits Microservices have been with us for nearly two decades, but it’s still far from easy to develop at scale, in a polyglot environment. The Dapr project, the Distributed Application Runtime, is an open source graduated project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) , which comes to address this pain. In my latest OpenObservability Talks episode I hosted Yaron Schneider , co-creator of Dapr (as well as of KEDA that will be covered in the next blog post ), and co-founder and CTO of Diagrid, a lead backer company to Dapr, to hear all about the project. Building microservices is hard. Anyone who has worked with distributed systems knows the challenges: connecting services, tracing asynchronous events, handling failures, scaling dynamically, accessing caching and messaging and more. Before Dapr, developers had to implement these patterns manually. Take the example of tracing, pulling SDKs for OpenTelemetry, wiring trace propagation through Kafka headers, and coordinating requests across multiple services. Even at Microsoft, where Yaron worked on Azure Container Apps, these issues were apparent at scale. Teams spent months and significant resources simply maintaining consistency across distributed workloads. Dapr was designed to address these inefficiencies — reducing what once took months to five minutes with a single developer. Dapr provides an application runtime for building microservices on Kubernetes. An intelligent sidecar alongside your application takes care of the messaging, pub-sub, service-to-service communications, storage, caching, secrets mgmt and more, so your application doesn’t need to be bothered with anything other than the local sidecar.